Gaze-based assistive manipulation typically supports object selection, while arbitrary-position placement requires accurate spatial alignment between the headset and robot. However, for gaze-based manipulation, pose accuracy does not necessarily translate into task accuracy: translational and rotational errors jointly affect the transformed gaze ray and may compensate for each other. To study cross-device alignment from this task-oriented perspective, we present a markerless interaction framework and a dedicated cross-device dataset. We propose Graph-based Reference Selection to address sparse robot references. We further develop and benchmark multiple task-specific alignment pipelines under a unified protocol. Specifically, we introduce Gaze--Surface Intersection Error (GSIE), which directly measures the spatial error of the gaze-specified target. Experiments show that alignment methods ranked highly by conventional pose metrics are not always optimal in GSIE, demonstrating the importance of evaluating gaze-based manipulation at the task level.
Gaze and speech are promising interaction modalities for individuals with motor impairments, yet robust intent recognition in multi-object environments remains challenging due to micro-saccades, semantic ambiguity, and viewpoint changes. This paper presents a multimodal interaction framework for assistive robotic manipulation. We propose a sticky-glance algorithm that stabilizes gaze-based intent by jointly accumulating geometric distance and directional evidence, enabling robust real-time target selection and switching. We further introduce Glance-Say, a gaze-speech interaction paradigm in which gaze specifies objects and speech specifies actions, together with a continuous shared-control scheme that provides high-readiness robot motion and human-in-the-loop feedback. Experiments demonstrate a tracking rate of 0.92 for moving targets, selection accuracy of 0.97 for static targets, and reduced task duration. These results indicate improved robustness, efficiency, and usability over representative interaction paradigms.
While zero-shot appearance-based 3D gaze estimation offers significant cost-efficiency by directly mapping RGB images to gaze vectors, its reliability in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) settings remains uncertain. Existing benchmarks frequently overlook fundamental HRI conditions, such as dynamic camera viewpoints and moving targets in video. Furthermore, current cross-dataset evaluations often suffer from a complexity gap, where methods trained on diverse datasets are tested on significantly smaller and less varied sets, failing to assess true robustness. To bridge these gaps, we introduce Gaze4HRI, a large-scale dataset (50+ subjects, 3,000+ videos, 600,000+ frames) designed to evaluate state-of-the-art performance against critical HRI variables: illumination, head-gaze conflict, as well as the motion of camera and gaze target in video. Our benchmark reveals that all evaluated methods fail in at least one condition, identifying steeply-downward gaze as a universal failure point. Notably, PureGaze trained on the ETH-X-Gaze dataset uniquely maintains resilience across all other conditions. These results challenge the recent focus in the literature on complex spatial-temporal modeling and Transformer-based architectures. Instead, our findings suggest that extensive data diversity, as exemplified by the ETH-X-Gaze dataset, serves as the primary driver of zero-shot robustness in unconstrained environments, while resilience-enhancing frameworks, such as PureGaze's self-adversarial loss for gaze feature purification, provide a substantial further improvement. Ultimately, this study establishes a rigorous benchmark that provides practical guidelines for practitioners as well as reshaping future research. The dataset and codes are available at https://gazeforhri.github.io.
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have recently shown strong potential for robot learning by following language instructions. However, in practice, language alone is often insufficient to precisely convey human intent. It is difficult to describe which exact object to interact with among similar candidates, where to act on the object, or how the target may change during execution. To address this limitation, we propose Gaze2Act, a novel VLA framework that leverages human gaze as a dynamic and intuitive intent signal for complex interactive manipulation. Gaze2Act first bridges the ego-exo view gap by mapping first-person gaze into the robot's perspective through cross-view semantic matching, producing both an object mask and a gaze point for coarse-to-fine target specification. These cues are then integrated into the policy through perception-level prompting and action-level conditioning, allowing the robot to attend to relevant regions and execute precise interactions under dynamic intent. In a systematic evaluation across seven task categories and 16 real-robot tasks on a Unitree G1 humanoid, Gaze2Act achieves state-of-the-art performance in both intent accuracy and task success rate. It notably outperforms baselines in object disambiguation, fine-grained interaction, and dynamic intent steering. These results demonstrate that human gaze provides a natural, low-burden, and highly expressive modality for human-in-the-loop VLA control.